Why do people rip using iso/mp3

there is only 1 thing i can think of for this and that it saves space on computers. well, i dont wanna get in trouble, but in other scenes, they dont compress games besides raring. this takes away from the quality of the games and makes it almost a chore to burn some games (i got a game with approx 70 music tracks). bin/cue may be bigger, but the quality stay the same, it burning it is a breeze. any1 agree or disagree with me, please ley me know of your opinion

I always make the games on my FTP that I encode ISO/MP3 because it's only running on a 9GB hard drive. Space is a big issue on FTP's, not only does making the games in ISO format make it so their can be more games on the FTP, it also makes it easyer to upload/download games from it.

im sure it wont catch on anytime soon, but using Windows Media instead of MP3 can make the game more like the original... a 128k WMA sounds more like the original than a 128k MP3 for example (and a 64k WMA sounds as good as a 128k MP3). i looked at some weird comparison chart thing that showed how all data is kept in tact when using Real Media or Windows Media, whereas some of the audio is actually "lost" when compressing using MP3.

MP3, Real Audio and Windows Media Audio are all lossy audio codecs. That is, they all discard information in order to make the audio file smaller. There are lossless audio codecs, like SHorteN, but these typically only yeild 40-60 percent reduction.

it also could exclude people from non-windows oses (linux/mac/beos/solaris whatever) as i dont know if those os'es have decoders for wma

Click to expand...

you can play WMA on mac and linux and on a lot of portable players. it does a good job @ 160kbit but sometimes it just don't sound right to me... (but the same goes for MP3)

Click to expand...

but you cant convert WMA to CDDA (aiff) on mac. and wma sounds like crap on mac anyway, due to microsoft's crappy windows media player, and it's not seekable on mac either. also, mp3 certainly sounds better at high bitrates than wma at high bitrates.

also . . i have all my rips in mp3/iso since i cant do bin/cue's because cdrwin is not for mac. also, if the mp3s are encoded at vbr, i dont notice any difference between bin/cue and mp3.

Just use a higher bitrate (168k/192k) & stop thinking that 128k bitrate is cd quality, that's bullshit. A high bitrate combined with VBR (high average), you should only hear the difference in a very high quality audio system.